The media organization that publishers and advertisers love to fault

Tom Drouillard, CEO of the Alliance for Audited Media: The nonprofit is grappling with how to measure audiences in a digital age.

You think running a newspaper is tough? Try leading the organization that tallies the industry's 21st-century circulation.

That's the job Tom Drouillard accepted last year when he became CEO of the Arlington Heights-based Alliance for Audited Media. In addition to chronicling the decline of print numbers of its news¬paper and magazine members, he is caught in the middle of a battle over how to measure digital readership, with media on one side and advertisers and their agencies on the other, and $80 billion in annual ad spending at stake.

About the only thing everyone can agree on these days is this: Members of the 101-year-old alliance aren't much allied.

The auditing organization, which once had to count only ink-on-paper copies of newspapers and magazines, is grappling with how to measure audiences as they increasingly read publications on desktops, tablets and smartphones. Media companies want to make sure these readers aren't undercounted. Advertisers want to make sure they're not exaggerated. Setting new standards for digital transparency and accountability may take years, says Drouillard, 54, a former CEO of New York-based Scarborough Research.

Photo

“Every medium goes through this storming time,” he says. “Nobody's happy because there's imperfection in how we measure and how we compare everything, and I think we're kind of in that right now.”

In a sign of the times, the organization renamed itself in 2012, dropping its long-held Audit Bureau of Circulations moniker. The nonprofit, which has a budget this year of $25 million, has been trying to become more digital itself, but 80 percent of its 220 employees still focus mainly on serving legacy newspaper companies.

The alliance's 30-member board will convene in South Carolina on March 12 to continue its debate over elusive new standards.

Today's wrangle is nothing new for an organization that got its start in Chicago at a time when rival newsboys beat each other up in the streets and publishers stole and dumped competitors' papers. Drouillard points to travails in the radio and TV industries as they have set new standards to count nontraditional audiences.

“The industry has gone through the most change in the past few years that we've ever seen,” says Brenda White, executive vice president for publishing in Chicago at ad agency Starcom USA, a unit of France's Publicis Groupe.

White, also an alliance board member, is pleased that the organization has reached agreement on some issues, such as the definition of a digital replica and counting of print versus digital magazine copies. But she acknowledges there's more to be done, especially in collaborating with other associations that play a role in setting standards, including the Association of National Advertisers, the Media Rating Council and the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Bob Liodice, CEO of the New York-based Association of National Advertisers, is less diplomatic. In a video made on the sidelines of the ad bureau's annual conference last month, he said the whole system needs to be turned upside down if advertisers stand any chance of adopting standards that would help stop as much as $10 billion in digital ad fraud a year, caused by such things as ad-¬clicking robots.

Advertisers also are upset over digital ads they say readers don't see because they're posted out of sight.

“The marketers are mad as hell,” Liodice says. “They have been living and growing in the digital space for a long time now and they're mad as hell because their money is being stolen from them—it's being put to unproductive uses.”

Some publishers are just as mad that they're not getting full credit for their digital readership. USA Today President and Publisher Larry Kramer suspects that tablet-edition readership is being underestimated because offline readers aren't included. And just as soon as the AAM finds consensus on one issue, the quickly evolving digital realm poses another problem. The myriad metrics have become “almost impossible to dissect,” he says.

“The newspaper industry has never been great in coming to consensus on things, so it needs organizations like the AAM to come to agreement,” Kramer says.

Beyond trying to settle squabbles among its members, Drouillard has another task: tending to AAM's own digital future and perhaps courting new digital members. On that front, the alliance will announce this month that it has landed a contract to certify the advertising practices of Alibaba, the online retailer in China that has become the world's largest e-commerce site.